After checking into the Grand Hotel in Syracuse, Sicily in May 1920, D. H. Lawrence observed signs of a recent struggle between man and insect: ‘It is a rather dreary hotel – and many squashed bloodstains of mosquitoes on the bedroom walls. Ah vile mosquitoes!’ Written in the midst of this battleground, or shortly after departing from it, Lawrence's poem ‘The Mosquito’ is a ‘paean of derision’ to the ‘pointed fiend’ caught sucking the speaker's blood. Unfolding in the present tense, it describes the state of profound irritation induced by this ‘hateful little trump | … Which shakes my sudden blood to hatred’. The speaker is particularly troubled by the mosquito's ability to get under his skin – literally and figuratively – expressing a sense of horror at its ‘obscenity of trespass’ (TP 288–9). Responding to the remorseless squashing of the creature at the end of the poem, Keith Sagar argues that in contrast to the other poems in his 1923 collection Birds, Beasts, and Flowers, ‘Lawrence makes no attempt to enter into the mosquito, or to take its otherness into himself. By violating his own separateness it has crossed a forbidden frontier, and that is obscene.’ Sagar rightly identifies the speaker's resistance to being contaminated by the mosquito's ‘otherness’, but there are also moments in the poem when the fear of violation gives way to a fantasy of breaking out of one's skin – of becoming mosquito. At one point the speaker wonders wistfully: ‘Am I not mosquito enough to out-mosquito you?’ A powerful sense of aversion is now replaced by something approaching longing, as the speaker's eagerness to destroy this threat to separateness becomes a desire to emulate its ‘imponderable weightlessness’ (TP 288–9).

Lawrence's speaker also refers to the mosquito's ‘suspended transport’, with the word ‘transport’ denoting both a physical carrying across from one place or person to another – from man to mosquito – as well as the sensation of being carried away ‘with the strength of some emotion; to cause to be beside oneself, to put into an ecstasy, to enrapture’.